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I felt victorious when my hand fell on the last of the boxes. It had been carefully and purposely sealed and stacked in the very back corner of the attic as if kept while being hidden away.
It was heavier than any of the others and held my curiosity longer. The air of mystery and reason for the layers of tape also piqued my interest as to what was inside. To break into it, I needed some serious reinforcements.
The air cooled the lower I moved through the house. The sky still held ominous clouds of warning that it could threaten rain at any time. Turning on the lights as I went brightened each room in a challenge to the outside world.
Placing the box on the kitchen table, I scurried through the loaded drawers for a knife before moving to make myself comfortable in the living room.
With the box on my lap, I ran the sharp edge of the knife along the tape, and the glue gave way without protest. My hand found a stack of Polaroid pictures of my mom and me.
She’d found an old camera at a pawnshop and had saved up to buy it. The technology had been old, and the film was scarce, so we’d perfected each photo before taking it. My mother truly had a special talent and flare for making the somewhat ordinary appear extraordinary.
I flicked through each one, examining them as if I were a detective looking for clues. My mother had a smile that lit up her entire face. She’d had a genuine classic beauty about her that was easily admired—a trait I had not inherited from her.
With the Polaroids in a carefully neat pile next to me, I reached into the box again, my hand grazing the soft leather of an old bound book. It looked expensive, indulgent, and out of place with my mother’s other possessions. Holding it up, I inhaled the musky scent of leather deep into my lungs.
Unwinding the strap of the book, I felt giddy, like a treasure hunter opening a chest as the anticipation built. Opening to the first page, it crackled slightly, and on the inside was the most intricate and detailed sketch of a lavender blossom I had ever seen in ink. In cursive writing, I recognized as my mother’s, was the name of the estate—Wisteria Pine Estate.
I traced the lines of my mother’s writing so I could feel the connection to her. With care, I turned the pages, revealing line upon line of details and recipes for growing, baking, and natural healing remedies made with lavender. It was like a passage through time and a collection of my momma’s detailed mind and vision for the lavender estate.
She’d had grand plans for the estate and her beloved lavender plantation. She had some crazy ideas in the mix, but none of them outweighed the ingenious of her bigger picture.
I felt awash with a twinge of guilt. Never had I expected to discover this sort of treasure or her secrets so obvious in this book. A dream was spelled out on the pages for this place to become our future—her legacy.
I held the book to my chest, holding it against my heart before setting it aside. I wanted to take the time to read every single word she had written and examine every sketch she had created. I wanted to wait until the timing could be perfect to open the world as she had witnessed it.
Another pile of cards was stacked together, bound by a piece of knotted string. Sliding the blade against the string, it broke free and unraveled.
In the first photo, I recognized a woman to be my grandma. The photo was terribly aged, and the date on the back was at least a decade before I was born. She sat regally on a Chesterfield sofa, dressed in a stiff-looking dress with a birdcage fascinator. A grimace on her face and no emotion in her eyes expressed anything but the nurturing mother I had expected of her. My mother had told me she had died not long before I was born by drowning. Her fears of a similar fate held her back from wanting to teach me to swim, which was why Callum had volunteered to teach me.
I’d told him the story of my grandmother, and he’d taken some convincing on my part to teach me. Eventually, he’d given in, always complaining about how I had him wrapped around my little finger.
Back then, I’d taken it for granted that Callum would never say no to me. I really was no good for him, which made me wonder if anything had changed at all.
The second photo was of a group, like a family gathering at a picnic. There were at least fifteen mismatched people in the one shot, a group of characters unlikely to be together unless they weren’t related in some way. A tall, dark-haired man with his back to the photographer stood in the foreground while my grandma and her sister sat at a table with big smiles. My aunty was huddled in between them with a sad expression on her face. My mother, as a teenager, stood shyly with her fingers clasped together.
I imagined she was twisting her hair around her finger. She did that, I remembered, kind of like an outlet for nervous energy. A habit she clearly had as a child and never outgrew, one I found myself subconsciously mimicking on occasion.
I hadn’t seen anyone from that side of my family since before my mother was locked away. They had cut ties long before I made it through elementary school. There was some bad blood there we didn’t talk about. Mother barely spoke of them in the years I was growing up. When I had asked, she’d always changed the subject or ignored me entirely. The pain hidden in the depths of her eyes spoke volumes even when her words were few.
I placed the photo down on top of the other before bringing my eyes back to the diminishing stack still in my hand. As I took in the scene of the third photo, my heart almost stopped while my hands shook. There, next to my grandma in the center of the picture, with one arm around his wife, my mother’s aunt, and his other hand possessively gripping my momma’s shoulder, stood a dark-haired man wearing a black eye patch.
Hehadto be her pirate, and without realizing it before now, I had met him.
Had I known it was going to be the moment I met my father, I might have paid more attention, and I might have asked more questions.
I might have been tempted to stab the rapist bastard to death myself.
* * *
My eyes ran the length of the street and back down while sitting outside Callum’s father’s store. I tried my hardest to act invisible. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, the snickering and hushed voices had grown exceptionally bad of late, and the topic of my heritage had been a hot subject matter lately. Like these women had any right to discuss mother’s and my lives as if they belonged to them or something.
Callum had promised me he wouldn’t be long. He was just running in to borrow some money from his dad, then we were going to get ice cream and go to the river.
I was growing impatient as the sun beat down on me, and Callum was still yet to reappear.
“Hello, Alina.”
I pasted a smile on my face before turning to greet the man who had spoken my name. My mother had raised me to be polite, so ignoring this man wasn’t something I was accustomed to.
